Review Roundup: The Death of the Novel

“The novel is dead. Long live the anti-novel, built from scraps,” David Shields writes in “Reality Hunger, a “manifesto” just out from Knopf. What he advocates in its place is a return of the “real” to literature, a realism best captured, he argues, by the collage, the lyric essay, and the memoir. Shields himself follows the collage format: the majority of the book consists of quotes from other writers (“The kinds of novels I like are ones which bear no trace of being novels&#8221—Geoff Dyer). He sees the lyric essay and the memoir as very human literary ventures, because, he argues, they allow the reader to witness the writer thinking through the writing process. The novel, on the other hand, presents the reader with a work that is often too perfectly contained: “Plot is for dead people.”

Let’s see how some reviewers feel:

The novelist Jami Attenberg is appreciative of Shields’s critique in Bookforum: “I am grateful for Shields’s sometimes brutal interrogation of what I believe. His critiques led me to reconsider my own creative process. How had I gotten to a particular moment at the end of some book or essay? What had been my intention? What had I wanted the audience to think about my characters—or about me, for that matter? Taking the time to consider these ideas felt extremely decadent—allowing a little bit of the luxurious contemplation Shields would wish for all readers.”

In the Guardian, Blake Morrison, also a novelist, suggests that Shields misses the point of fiction: “Shields sells fiction short. “Conventional fiction teaches the reader that life is a coherent, fathomable whole,” he claims. Does it? Isn’t this patronising to novelist and reader alike? Can’t wresting order out of chaos be a triumph against the odds? And what exactly is this hated creature, the “conventional” or “standard” novel? The premise is that because life is fragmentary, art must be. But poems that rhyme needn’t be a copout. And novels with a clear plot and definite resolution can still be full of ambiguity, darkness and doubt. By the same token, to engage with the dilemmas of an imaginary character means learning to empathise with otherness, and few skills are more important in the world today. Shields has written a provocative and entertaining manifesto. But in his hunger for reality, he forgets that fiction also offers the sustenance of truth.”

Laura Miller is completely exasperated on Salon: “The novel is dead to him, but so what? Can’t he just go off and write whatever he wants to write without climbing up on a soapbox to make a speech about it? How does this offbeat preference of his merit a book-length manifesto? Why does this book exist?”

James Wood finds contradictions in Shields’s argument, in The New Yorker: “His complaints about the tediousness and terminality of current fictional convention are well-taken: it is always a good time to shred formulas. But the other half of his manifesto, his unexamined promotion of what he insists on calling “reality” over fiction, is highly problematic Strangely enough, using Shields’s aesthetic terms and most of his preferred writers (along with some of those he seems not to prefer), a passionate defense of fiction and fiction-making could easily be made. Perhaps he will write that book next.”

Lincoln Michel provides a thoughtful and evenhanded response, aptly named “Reality Boredom: Why David Shields is Completely Right and Totally Wrong,” in The Rumpus: “The book is framed by a somewhat incoherent thesis that fiction is dead, narrative is pointless and the premier literary form of the now is the lyric essay (with memoir, it would seem, being a close second). I cannot be the only one to read a supposedly radical manifesto—the book jacket labels detractors as mere defenders of “the status quo”—and be a little disappointed to learn that the novel is dead (again?) and the literature of our bright, hectic future is the lyric essay and memoir. Even the terms “lyric essay” and “memoir” feel dusty sandwiched between discussions of hip-hop and cell phone stories. In short, I read this book with as much disagreement as agreement.”